Turning the house where Adolf Hitler was born into a police station has raised mixed emotions in his Austrian hometown.
“It’s a double-edged sword,” office assistant Sibylle Treiblmaier said outside the house in the town of Braunau am Inn on the border with Germany.
While it might discourage far-right extremists from gathering at the site, it could have “been used better or differently,” they said.
Photo: AFP
The government wants to “neutralize” the site and passed a law in 2016 to take control of the building from its private owner.
Austria has repeatedly been criticized in the past for not fully acknowledging its responsibility in the Holocaust.
The far-right Freedom Party, founded by former Nazis, is ahead in the polls after getting the most votes in a national election for the first time in 2024, although it failed to form a government.
Last year, two streets in Braunau am Inn commemorating Nazis were renamed after years of complaints by activists.
The house where Hitler was born on April 20, 1889, and lived for a short period of his early life, is right in the center of town on a narrow shop-lined street.
A memorial stone in front reads: “For Peace, Freedom and Democracy. Never Again Fascism. Millions of Dead Warn.”
Officers are scheduled to move in during the second quarter of the year, the German Federal Ministry of the Interior said.
For author Ludwig Laher, a member of the Mauthausen Committee Austria that represents Holocaust victims, “a police station is problematic, as the police... are obliged, in every political system, to protect what the state wants.”
An earlier idea to turn the house into a place where people would come together to discuss peace-building had “received a lot of support,” he said.
Jasmin Stadler, a 34-year-old shop owner and Braunau native, said it would have been interesting to put Hitler’s birth in the house in a “historic context,” explaining more about the house.
She also slammed the 20 million euro (US$23.56 million) cost of the rebuild.
Others are in favor of the redesign of the house, which many years ago was rented by the interior ministry and housed a center for people with disabilities before it fell into disrepair.
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